landisaurus has been hoping it will work for Elemental for a long time. I still kinda wish his contest hadn't gone down the golf-shirt route, though...

Could you take a pic of that and post it, I'd love to see that.

Okay, first of all something that noone has mentioned so far (unless I overread it):

IT really mattered WHERE you decided to put a new settlement. Why? Making use of ressources around it. The Surveyor was your friend in the process of deciding as well through telling you about available food, max. pop, prod bonus and gold bonus.

Not only the sheer variety of units but also their special abilities. Try hitting a Drake with magicians, priests or such and you'll fail miserably. Try again with a bunch of first strike armor piercing Paladins and be amazed at how quick it is vaquished.

Spells that help you flatten even the hardest monster. Evil Death Knights rip your adventuring party apart? Lucky you have a Dispel Evil or Holy Word spell handy. You don't? Then OUCHIE!

Raiders and monsters. You rally your forces but forget to leave some units behind to protect your cities? Bad luck! You're screwed sooner or later.

Now for the downside apart from awful diplomacy and AI:

quote: "Huge number of magic weapons, armor and other magical items to augment your heroes and compliment the buffs placed on them"

Of which obviously only your heroes make any use. I think I've never encountered ANY foreign hero who was equiped with ANY magical item...

Taking into account that every hero had one and some heroes had two misc item slots there were too few misc items to be found. Item creation helped you out but therefore it was almost unnescessary to create armor or offensive weapons coz you find enough in ruins and nodes.

yeah, I have the old CD version.   I love its thick manual.  

I want a Master of Magic shirt!   

Where is our picture?

And cycles are no longer an issue with the latest DosBox emulation core. The game now runs amazingly well on it.

• Cheating AI - doesn't pay upkeep, ... massive bonuses on hard/impossible

It is strange how players today are touchy about the AIs having massive bonuses.  I also have one massive bonus, human nous (I almost can hear the AIs screaming: "cheater !!"). I play a lot of chess and once you face somebody who is not as good in the game as you, the game loses plot, is boring. So you usually give him some incredible advantage at the start (you play without a piece or two). That is not a cheating, for me. It makes the game a lot of fun, as well.

The other way round is to learn AI to play for the optimal way, which means brainlessly copying the human found routine. I know that this will sound strange, but THAT is actually boring for me ("cough, cough", here you may insert a name of  one of Stardock's games). I love to overcome incredibly "cheating" AIs, and I love to find weaknesses in their routines. David vs. Goliath!

Anyway, the 1st thing you mentioned is not true, only a common myth. AI pays upkeep, if only a 30% [edit: I was wrong, 50% on impossible, 75% on hard] of regular one. And the bonuses were made truly staggering (300% on impossible, hehe) only in the latest patch, because they were lazy to correct the AI routines and bugs instead. So what, says David.

• food/population works in strange ways,
  
• No aftifact use on enemy heroes

Both are bugs. AI can use an artifact it steals from you, but they made a stupid mistake in the creation item routine. The programmers really did horrible job with cleaning the bugs.

• Relative inability to judge enemy strength... "sprites" can mean 1 or 8...
• No significant diplomacy options with races not sharing spell books.

Excellent observations.

The manual was very cool, and the MoM strategy guide is probably the best one ever made - full details on spells and units. I firmly believe most die-hard strategy folks want visibility to the mechanics, rather than vague swags at the mechanics where patches can have sweeping impacts without any visibility to what was really changed.  Don't tell me "Armageddon deals a devastating blow to all in the area" and then change it from X gajillion points of damage to everything on the map to Y points of damage to 2 units without telling me exactly what that impact was.  The flavor text is fine, and some people *just* want to see the flavor text, but I should be able to drill down and get some math in my game without scouring through 400 lines of code for each spell, thank you very much.

1. Lots of big nasty summoned monsters that really mean something -- Great Wyrm, Great Drake, Colossus, Sky Drake.........and most of them are useful under some situations.

2.Combinations and Varieties. Buffing Death knights, Hydra, slinger, longbow men  ..... simply rock.

3.Counter Spell. Invisibility vs True sight, Buff spell vs Dispel and Disenchant spells. I hate those AI that cast dispel spell that rip my super hero into kittie!  (And that's where Spell Lock comes into.......)

4.Feeling of achievement to conquer a node, ruin, lair..... It gives spells, artifacts and even spell books....etc!!

  And when you melt ur magic spirit with the node and see it glowing with the aura with mana flowing in. Wow! that's called an achievement.

5.Random merchants that offer artifcats, troops,......... 

6.The fame system that affect the chance to attract heroes and merchants and even the stability of citites.

7.City enhance or nerf spells.  Stream of Life, Prosperity, Gaia's Blessing, Chaos Rift, Plague...... But the buffing is way better than the nerfing spells.

There are simply too many to goes on and on.....

By the way, I konw MOM is not known for its AI or Balance. But sometimes over emphasis on balance simply hurts a single player game. At least that's what I think of AoW:Shadow Magic. 

THE GOOD

1) Tremendous variety

Huge and interesting variety of possible wizard customization options, racial choices, heroes, and randomized maps with two planes of existence

2) Great sense of exploration

Randomized maps (again), the two planes, wide range of creatures, spells, events, artifacts. Filled to the brim with stuff to encounter, acquire, or battle

3) Broad scope

You go from being a puny and weak spellcaster with a small hamlet to a mighty wizard with a multi-plane empire

4) Interesting choices

What school of magic do you specialize in? What sorts of troops do you build? Do you use regular troops, heroes, artifacts, summoned creatures, combat magic or support magic to win fights? How do you place your cities? What spells do you use against your enemies empires, and what spells do you boost your own with? Where do you expand or conquer?

--

There were some pretty significant negatives worth mentioning however

THE BAD

1) Terrible AI.

Somewhat forgiven for its age and the complexity of the game at the time, but I don't think I'd be so forgiving today. I don't even really care if the AI 'cheats' or doesn't even necessarily play by the same rules as the player, I'd rather have an interesting game, where the AI makes use of all aspects of the game, whatever methods are used behind the scenes to achieve that end.

2) Awful, tedious micromanagement.

City development was repetitive and tiresome in the mid and late game, and managing the huge numbers of troops also became a pain in the mid and late game.

3) Bugs.

Many, many bugs. Again, not surprising based on the scope of the game. Not too worried about that with Elemental though, pretty good track record so far!

4) Opaque diplomacy.

Again, I can't criticize this too much based on the age of the game, but AI diplomacy needs to be _very_ transparent, so that it's simply another aspect of gameplay, rather than an obscure, behind the scenes mechanism that is difficult to understand without access to a detailed wiki entry.

And I never want to see round robin tech tree trading abuse in another TBS again, ever

5) Slow pace

The counterpoint to the micromanagement, the early game often had long stretches of 'next turn'.

I'd much, much rather see the length of the game compressed somewhat so the start is quicker, and the interesting bits come more quickly for midgame, culminating in a more epic end game.

Too many turn based strategy games bog down in the mid and late game, and I know there are a thousand thousand unfinished games of Moo/Mom/Civ/GalCiv out there.

+ The AI was not terrible it is better than Age of Wonders and HOMM series by a long shot at least it tried to beat you instead of being just a delaying action'

+ The combat was swift yet tactful. Only thing I didn't like was that running around for 25 turns with a single unit just to not lose the battle. This needs to be fixed and avenues of retreat input so stupid battles like this don't take place. Possibly just give battles a turn limit and the one ahead by size and combat eliminations WINS the battle not the idiot who just runs around for 25 turns using a game mechanic exploit.

+ A lot of diversity and difficulty with each race. Some races were overpowered (because there is no multiplayer this didn't matter) and some races were pretty weak (Gnolls).

+ Awesome magic schools and ability to make up all kinds of wizard types. Some abilities were overpowered though like alchemy where you could exchange gold for mana 1 to 1. Should cost a lot more gold for 1 energy as it was all too easy to build up your mana pool with the abundance of gold you could get. Some summoned units were waaaaay overpowered like Lycanthropes if 1 out of 9 survived you got the whole army of them back. This was stupid but a very powerful force. Sky drakes and Paladins about the only things that could take each other out. You got to one or the other and you could plow through anything. I'd rather see not so powerful units in the game that can just rampage like they could. I'd rather see level 3 units max so there's some good tactical battles and not some over-run of Tiger Tanks in the end game.

+ Random maps and placements a big plus, needed more AI opponents though. Optimum startup was small map with 4 ai opponents for me. Everyone was real close and I couldn't get 10 instant cities going which was usually the game ender because I could spread out so fast and build up on large or huge maps.

+ That your wizard or the ai wizard WASN'T out of the game just because they lost a major battle and lost their capital city. I don't like games where the game ends if you kill one particular character or take just one particular city/capital. That's alright for multiplayer and you want to finish a game in an afternoon or weekend, but, for SINGLE player games they should last a long time and there should be OPTIONS on HOW IT ENDS. Sid Meier's ALPHA CENTAURI does this very well and is my favorite CIV type game.

- The negative: Let's face it AI's are really pretty lame and stupid even though MOM's was pretty good at Hard or Impossible settings. But, I've asked this 100 times every forum I visit that is making a game. Why the hell can't you make ALL the AI opponents GO AFTER the HUMAN player when he's winning by a large margin? Cmon I know most of us just hate it at the mid game and most suredly the end game when we have NO FEAR OF LOSING. We KNOW we can defeat any SINGLE AI opponent at those points and it really makes the game POINTLESS to play to the end. BUT, if the programmers would program an ALL OUT AI OFFENSIVE vs the PLAYER and LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE then the game could be fun all the way to the end. Medieval TW origional is the only game where I've seen this done properly by allowing dead factions to return with monster forces above and beyond what might be in play and something these EMPIRE games need badly is REVOLTS in the MID/END game like MTW did it. I love that game as I have fun all the way to the last turn. The more cities a HUMAN player gets the harder it becomes to keep them all aligned. There should be full GROUPS of them REVOLT not just ONE that is so easy to get back it's hardly worth the programming to make them revolt.

++Hopefully Brad knows all this and will make sure ELEMENTAL doesn't turn into another AOW or HOMM series of idiotic AI and no challenge whatsoever. There are so many things that could be added or tweaked to make games challenging from beginning to end. Unfortunately I don't have the funds to make one or I'd make the PERFECT Empire building fantasy wargame. It would be so good you'd cry that you have to goto school or work everyday.

One thing I liked about MoM over say, the AoW games that came later...

MoM had multi-figure units for the low level units, and then less and less figures per unit up to the top tier, where you generally only had one (Unless they were Paladins)

After a lot of playing AoW: SM, I decided that this was actually a more important difference than it might appear, because it kept certain low rank units viable into the end game, instead of making them a liability. The fact that multi-figure units had to be dealt with differently, not all direct damage spells would spread across an entire unit, and they worked better as cannon fodder and such.

Sure, the top tier guys were still better, but there were notable arguments to be made for bringing a mixed bag force instead of just max stack size of nothing but your top tier unit type...